The first thing I thought of whilst brainstorming for ideas was to set a few main topics I can base my map around. I referred to the 2 sample maps and the assessment doc for ideas, and decided id base my map on Idiolect, Register, Paralanguage, Media, Family language background, Culture, Location, and Phonology. While writing for Idiolects, I got ideas for what to write in the Location box, and then after I finished Location, a whole lot of fresh ideas tumbled into my head that was related to Culture, and this chain of one topic giving birth to ideas for another topic continued until I had more content than I needed.
After I was done with my content, I moved on to my chart, and I started to write the heading. Consequently, I had just seen an ad for a brand called ” Fear of God”, in which the logo was written in an ‘ Old English ‘ type font. I thought, ” since this whole chart is about how my language usage developed, it would be a good idea to have the topic written in ” Old English ” font and the content surrounding it in more modern fonts, indicating the development of the project from the beginning to the end. After I was done with the title, I moved on to the layout. My thoughts were to inculcate as many shapes as I can and utilize my creativity and artistic capability while keeping the chart clean and well organized. I started by drawing a circle in the corner, my first topic would go there which was idiolects and sociolects. I started with a circle and on the top left corner as when I would draw a landscape drawing, I would always draw the sun first, and in the top left corner, so it only felt natural to do the same here. Then, I looked into my art book for inspiration. I saw a lot of work where I had made particular objects drip, and so I implemented that into the chart and made a huge drop that said Paralanguage, leaking from the earlier bubble containing idiolects. I also saw I used a lot of smoke in my drawings, and drew something that resembled that in the corner, and left it without a heading. At this point, I did not have enough clean shapes, so I filled the top right/center with a few quadrilaterals. I labeled these Family and Phonology. I noticed there was a huge empty space at the bottom center of my chart, and realized I hadn’t left space for Media yet. I felt like a laptop would suit the space and the title perfectly, so I used mine as a reference and drew it. I filled up the remaining space with various shapes and then outlined the whole thing.
Subsequently, I started filling in my content. I started on the top left corner, filling in the Idiolect and Sociolect parts. I moved on to location, and since I had too much content, I almost improvised this part to a certain extent. After I was done with location, I started to fill in phonology and family. I tried to use as many colors as possible, and had begun the project to make it go from dark colors to light, but ended up not following it. Next, I moved on to Paralanguage and Register, which also went pretty smooth. Once I was done with that part, I faced some difficulties. I didn’t quite like some of the content I had, and I also felt like I didn’t have enough content to fill up my space. This lead to me writing more content, to replace content I disliked and to add new content. Then, I filled in media, the section for Friends, the section for culture, the section for lexicons and the section for my language. Once I was done with that, I was hit with a wave of ideas for the Media topic, and decided to use the smoke as a subtopic for media.
This project taught me a lot of things about what influences my language usage, my choice of words and my overall means of communication. It also taught me a lot about time management, and how, if I really focus, I can do a good job even under the pressure of time.